Trains
To ride the train is to let the whole world in. Old brick downtowns, Black Angus bulls, trucks idling at the crossroads, dawn on the high plains, pronghorns racing across the open range—whole worlds coming and going. And inside, a few hundred of us, an ephemeral drifting world, ourselves: Black and white, American and European, rich and poor, just this once and never again, traveling together, swaying as the train rides the tracks, entering each other’s lives for these few hours before we disembark: this one in the dead of night in Dodge City, Kansas; that one in early morning light in Pueblo, Colorado; that one riding on to the City of Angels, waving goodbye as we shoulder our bags and walk down the platform toward whatever awaits us.
Zenshin Florence Caplow is a Soto Zen priest in the Suzuki Roshi lineage. She has been practicing Vipassana and Zen for 25 years with the San Francisco Zen Center, Everyday Zen, Spirit Rock and other sanghas. She is a dharma teacher, field botanist, environmental activist, essayist and editor. An itinerant monk, she is generally found somewhere west of the Rockies in her biodiesel car, and she is currently a seminarian at the Graduate Theological Union. Florence is the co-editor of The Hidden Lamp: Stories FromTwenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women and Wildbranch, an anthology of nature writing. Her essays can be read in Tricycle, Inquiring Mind, and on her blog, Slipping Glimpser: Zen Wanderings and Wonderings.
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